‘What? I was waiting up for you, you were late, but then the clocks changed …’
He pauses, maintaining eye contact. ‘The clocks go back tomorrow. It’s Friday today?’
Day Minus One, 08:20
Some internal elevator plunges down the centre of Jen’s chest. She pushes her hair off her face and heads to the family bathroom at the back of the house, holding up a finger to Todd for just a second. She shivers as she turns her back on him, like he is a predator she wants to keep an eye on.
She is sick into the toilet, the sort of sick she hasn’t been in years. Hardly anything comes up, just a sticky yellow stomach acid that sits right at the bottom of the water. She thinks of her pregnancy, when she told a doctor she was vomiting so much that only bile was coming up, and he apparently felt the need to say, ‘Bile is bright green and signals real trouble. You mean stomach acid.’
She stares and stares into the acid lining the bottom of the toilet. It might not be bile, but she thinks she might be in real trouble.
Todd does not know what she is talking about. That is clear. Even he wouldn’t deny this. But why? How?
The pumpkin. The pumpkin is missing. Where is her husband? She can’t think straight. Panic rises up through her body, a great pressure with nowhere to go. She’s going to be sick again.
She sits on the cold chequerboard tiles.
She gets her phone out of her pocket and stares at it, bringing up the calendar.
It is Friday the twenty-eighth of October. The clocks do indeed go back tomorrow. Monday will be Halloween. Jen stares and stares at that date. How can this be?
She must be going mad. She gets up and paces uselessly. Her body feels like it’s covered in ants. She’s got to get out of here. But out of where? Out of yesterday?
She navigates to her last text message with Kelly and presses call.
He answers immediately. ‘Look,’ she says urgently.
‘Uh-oh,’ he says, languid, always amused by her. She hears a door close.
‘Where are you?’ she asks. She knows she sounds crazed, but she can’t help it.
A beat. ‘I am on planet Earth, but it sounds like you might not be.’
‘Be serious.’
‘I’m at work! Obviously! Where are you?’
‘Was Todd arrested last night?’
‘What?’ She hears him put something heavy down on a hollow-sounding floor. ‘Er – for what?’
‘No, I’m asking you. Was he?’
‘No?’ Kelly says, sounding baffled. Jen can’t believe it. Sweat blooms across her chest. She starts to rub at her arms.
‘But we sat – we sat in the police station. You shouted at them. The clocks had just gone back, I was … I had done the pumpkin.’
‘Look – are you okay? I need to finish Merrilocks,’ he says.
Jen sucks a breath in. He said he finished there yesterday. Didn’t he? Yes, she’s sure he did. He was at the top of the landing, wearing only a tattoo and a smile. She can remember it. She can.
She puts a hand to her eyes as if she can block out the world.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says. She starts to cry, water lacing her words. ‘What did we do? Last night?’ She leans her head back against the wall. ‘Did I do the pumpkin?’
‘What are you –’
‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She rolls her pyjamas up over her knees and stares at her skin. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. No blood under her nails. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms fast, like a time-lapse.
‘Did I carve the pumpkin?’ she asks again, but, as she speaks, some deep realization is dawning all around her. If it didn’t happen … she might have lost her mind, but her son isn’t a murderer. She feels her shoulders drop, just slightly, in relief.
‘No, you – you said you couldn’t be arsed …’ he says with a little laugh.
‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing exactly how that pumpkin turned out.
She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She meets her own eyes. She is a portrait of a panicked woman. Dark hair, pale complexion. Hunted eyes.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it was a dream,’ she says, though how can it be?
‘Okay,’ Kelly says slowly. Perhaps he is about to say something but decides against it, because he says only ‘Okay,’ again, then adds: ‘I’ll leave early,’ and Jen is glad he is this, a family man, not the kind of man who goes to pubs or plays sport with friends, just her Kelly.
She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen. Mist shrouds the garden beyond their patio doors, erasing the tops of the trees to nothing. Kelly built this kitchen for them a couple of years ago, after she had said – drunk – that she wanted to be ‘the kind of woman who has her shit together, you know, happy clients, a happy kid, a Belfast sink.’
He presented it to her one evening. ‘Expect to imminently have your shit together, Jen, because you’ve got the sink of dreams here.’
The memory fades. Jen always advises her stressed trainees to take ten deep breaths and make a coffee, so that’s what she will do herself. She’s trained for this. Two decades in a high-pressure job does give you some skills.
But as she approaches their marble kitchen island, her footsteps slow. A whole, uncarved pumpkin sits on the side.
She stops dead. It may as well be a ghost. Jen thinks she might be sick again. ‘Oh,’ she says to nobody, a tiny slip of a word, a giant syllable of understanding. She approaches the pumpkin as though it is an unexploded bomb and turns it around, but it’s whole underneath her fingertips, firm and unharmed, and Jesus Christ last night didn’t happen. It didn’t fucking happen. Relief laps over her. He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it.
She listens to Todd in his room. Opening and closing drawers, footsteps back and forth, the sound of a zip.
‘Back in the real world yet?’ he says, arriving in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. His arch tone makes Jen jump. She stares at him. His body. He is slimmer than he was a few weeks ago, isn’t he?
‘Almost,’ she says automatically. She swallows twice. Her back feels shivery, like she’s ill, adrenalin burning a kind of feverish panic.
‘Well, good …’
‘I guess I had a horrible dream.’
‘Oh, bummer,’ Todd says simply, as though something could explain her confusion so easily.
‘Yeah. But – look. In it – you killed somebody.’
‘Wow,’ he says, but something shifts, just slightly, beneath the surface of his expression, like a fish swimming deep in an ocean, unseen, apart from the ripples created by it. ‘Who?’ he says, which Jen thinks is a strange initial question. She is accustomed to seeing clients not tell the complete truth, and that is what this looks like to her.
He reaches to pull his dark hair back from his forehead. His T-shirt rides up, exposing the waist she used to hold when he was tiny and wriggly, just learning to sit up, to bounce, to walk. She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.